nuts
- 1Plural of nut: hard-shelled seeds or kernels, threaded fasteners for bolts, or, informally, people who are crazy or obsessed.
Roasted nuts make a quick and filling snack.
The recipe calls for a handful of chopped nuts.
Note
One plural carries every meaning of nut at once: kernels in a shell, threaded hardware screwed onto bolts, and, in slang, heads and the people attached to them, both crazy people and extreme enthusiasts. So a bag of nuts and a room of golf nuts share one form.
- 2Crazy or mad, or overcome with intense emotion: either unusually pleased or, in other contexts, unusually angry.
The crowd went nuts when the home team scored in the final minute.
Dad went nuts when he spotted the fresh dent in the car.
UsageCommon patterns include go nuts, be nuts, and drive someone nuts. In go nuts over something, over introduces the cause.
Similarcrazy, wild, berserk, ballistic
Note
The word can mean crazy, as in you must be nuts, but it often describes a burst of feeling that points either way. A crowd goes nuts over a goal, and the same crowd goes nuts over a bad call against its team, so only context tells delight from fury.
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Less common meanings
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- 6Third-person singular simple present of nut.
In the bar fight scene, the hero nuts the biggest guy in the room, and the whole place goes silent.
Whenever the striker loses his temper, he nuts a defender and gets sent off.
Note
Behind this present-tense form stand verbs of very different standing. One is the harmless rural verb meaning to gather nuts. The others are slang: a British use meaning to headbutt, one meaning to hit in the testicles, one meaning to defeat thoroughly, and a vulgar one meaning to ejaculate.
- 7In poker, the best possible hand available in a given situation, one that cannot be beaten.
She flopped the nuts and slow-played the hand to trap aggressive opponents.
With the ace-high straight, he held the nuts and bet big.
UsageBoth the nuts is and the nuts are occur. Before another noun, use nut, as in the nut flush.
Note
A card player's superlative that depends entirely on the board: which hand counts as the nuts changes with every set of shared cards. On a board of four fours and a jack, any hand holding an ace is the nuts.
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 2 facts
- In community-card poker, the board determines which hand is the nuts. pokerstars.com
- In Texas Hold’em, on a board of four fours and a jack, any player holding an ace has the nuts: four fours with the highest possible kicker. pokerstars.com
Showing meanings only.
nuts is a form of nut
nut, noun: A hard-shelled seed or dry fruit with an edible kernel, produced by many kinds of plant; in botany, strictly a hard, dry fruit that does not split open to release its single seed. Full entry
- Forms
- nutnuts plural
- Spelling
- nut → nuts: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Practice
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